"Adobe first launched Creative Suite 1 back in 2003, and now, ten years and six versions later, the company is taking a left turn: Adobe is abandoning its Creative Suite entirely to focus efforts on Creative Cloud."

is why they didn't do it sooner? For their core market the sub model makes sense, and may even be preferable in a lot of cases. The only thing I have to wonder about is what the licensing will look like for students.

Subscription models are very asymmetric. While they tend to make little sense from a customer's self interests perspective, these sort of business models are mainly about providing steady and predictable revenue for the producer. While having the beneficial side effects of locking competitors out via the subscription inertia, piracy is hurdled as well.

One thing still not properly addressed by Adobe is how they are going to deal with the plugin versioning(sic) nightmare. The economic investment in those plugins are one of the main "value propositions" why many of CS customers stick with it.

[qOne thing still not properly addressed by Adobe is how they are going to deal with the plugin versioning(sic) nightmare. The economic investment in those plugins are one of the main "value propositions" why many of CS customers stick with it. [/q]

Well... I was at Adobe Max and I have the beta. One of the ways they are dealing with the plugin upgrade issue is by letting Cloud users download a CS 6 product if they need it for legacy compatibility with workflows, old files or plugins. But you can also keep the newer version side by side. They know people have valid reasons to run past versions, which is partly why they have been making an effort to allow new versions to work side by side with past versions. You used to get into big problems trying run past versions side by side.

Artists were many more hats these days. Photographers often find themselves doing video, print designers need web tools these days. Having access to all the tools at once really frees you to learn and explore everything that is creatively possible.